Artist and writer, Harland Miller, explores the aural, written, and typographical possibilities of language as visual medium. Manifold’s latest edition with the artist, LUV, is taken from a recent painting of the same title from the artist’s series, Letter Paintings, which was first exhibited at Miller’s solo exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong in 2019. The Letter Paintings begin with the idea of using a single, short word, often one or two syllables (such as ACE, Boss or in this case, LUV) as a book title, deconstructing and reconstructing the word through gestural abstraction.

For Miller, language is painterly, and letters are akin to brushstrokes that build compositional meaning. The work hints towards emotional legibility through its articulation of ‘love’, yet the word itself is dismantled into its distinctly modern abbreviation of ‘LUV’. Words are visual matter to be pulled apart and reconfigured, mirroring the continuously evolving state of language as it responds to contemporary technology. Layering letters as a visual field draws on 60s and 70s graphic design as well as Jasper Johns’ series 0 through 9, where numerals become singular motifs, their forms interweaving through one-another without suggestion of a pattern. In Miller’s LUV, letters similarly both emerge and blur into one another, containing evolving typographical potential.

The LUV edition has been nearly two years in the making, created from multiple layers of woodcut printing with neon pigments and hand-finishing by the print studio.